How to make a marketing plan for SMEs?

Until recently the concept of " marketing plan " was something exclusive of large companies like custom essays with large budgets and specific departments dedicated to creating and maintaining the brand image and communication with customers. Fortunately, this is something of the past because the Internet and social networks have come to popularize marketing.

Today, small businesses and freelancers not only have the possibility of having their own marketing plan, but the obligation to start it if they want to succeed. In fact, the smaller the company's budget, the more necessary it is to use a marketing plan to invest it efficiently.

There are many variations and opinions about how to make a good marketing plan for SMEs, and its complexity can be great if the company's objective requires it, but it does not have to be complicated. The manager of a microenterprise or an independent professional can elaborate his plan in an easy way answering a few basic questions:

What do I want to achieve?

Obviously the main objective is to obtain benefits, but we must specify more our business strategy. If we have a start-up company, do we want our brand to be known? Or maybe we prefer to make a new and unique product known? Do we want to let us know how professionals of a specific service? If our business has been around for a while, do we want to renew or expand our clientele? Do we want to promote the opening of new stores?

The answer to these questions is the one that will determine the whole marketing plan and, after starting it, it will allow us to determine if we have achieved our objectives or not. Otherwise we would be working aimlessly.

Who are my potential clients?

The answer should be based on the information that a business plan should already have with the sociodemographic data of the public we want to contact: where do they live? how old are they? what gender? What level of income? ... The more data we can establish, the more effective our marketing plan will be, so we must add more information of a subjective nature: what habits do they have? What interests? What products do they consume? What worries them? What do they aspire to? The success of our marketing plan will depend on the knowledge we have of our target audience.

Where can I find my clients?

Once we know who they are, we have to ask ourselves how to find them in terms of marketing. What in the offline world would be the billboard where our potential customers go, the announcement in the television program they see, or the direct brochure to their mailbox; in the digital world it becomes the announcement in the page of Internet that they visit, the commentary in the social network that they use or the email that arrives directly to them to their mail tray.

We have to start by putting ourselves in their place and answering. What do our Internet customers use? Just to check the mail? Do you read the newspaper online? Do you visit sports, movies or fashion pages? Do we believe that our potential customers use Facebook and Twitter? Or YouTube and Instagram?

How can I communicate with customers?

Based on the profile of our audience and the channel they use, we must define how we want to reach them: will we use promotions? useful information? An aspirational image? We can use the so-called traditional advertising to adapt it to the networks as banners or videos. Or we may want to be a respected opinion in the sector to which we dedicate ourselves and for that we must give useful and truthful information through our website or specialized blogs. We may want to create an informal brand image, and then we must use a humorous tone in texts and images.

Maybe this is the most complicated part of the marketing plan if you do not know the ins and outs of social networks and your commercial possibilities, but a digital marketing expert could guide and / or implement the appropriate campaigns with ease.

How much can I spend on marketing?

The great advantage of the digital world is its flexibility in the price, but even so it supposes a cost, for which it is necessary to know well where to put the investments. We must begin by determining what our profit margin is and deciding what proportion is optimal to invest in growing the business. The best thing is that if you're not sure you do not have to bet everything to a channel and at one time. You can, and should, test how each type of action works in each channel to know which of them obtains a better result depending on your objectives.

What am I getting with my marketing plan?

Keep in mind that the social network that gets the most "I like you" does not have to be the one that originates the most traffic to your website or the one that generates the most sales. A video that goes viral but nobody remembers the advertiser's brand is not a success in terms of marketing. A marketing plan without an exhaustive measurement is a foolishness both in the offline world and online. The advantage is that in the online world we do not limit ourselves to measuring sales or profits, but we have many more measurement options that help us understand the  customer journey or the trip the client makes on the internet until they find our products and services. We can fine-tune much more in the definition of target audience, we can know which channels or which ads are most effective and we can detect performance problems.

And then what?

A marketing plan is not something static, it must be in continuous transformation and optimization. The advantage of digital marketing is that it allows us to improve the actions month by month or even week by week and test new things based on those results.

If you really want your business to succeed just like essay mafia, do not forget to create your marketing plan and create the right strategies to make it prosper. If you do not have the desire or the time to do it, you can always hire a digital marketing agency such as Pixel & Roi and outsource the entire process. You will ensure results and avoid headaches.